Lowering the Threshold
Demagoguery Makes Anti-Semitic Violence Possible
A friend of mine is spending several months in Australia, navigating a new phase in his life. When I heard about the shootings at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney earlier this week, I messaged him to say that I was sad and angry, and that I hoped he was safe.
The one thing I did not say to him was that I was surprised.
The night before, Barb and I had sat in an almost empty movie theater watching Nuremberg, the new film about the 1945 to 1946 trials that held Nazi leaders accountable for war crimes, including the murder of six million Jews. Watching it now, nearly eighty years later, felt less like a history lesson and more like a warning that we keep needing and keep failing to heed.
Antisemitism does not sleep. Whether it is called the Final Solution or Globalizing the Intifada, whether it erupts at the Nova Music Festival, Bondi Beach, or the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, it is the same unbroken chain of centuries of hatred, cruelty, and inhumanity directed at my religion and my people.
I have lived long enough to recognize the rhythm. As a child, I experienced a few anti-Semitic incidents firsthand, brief but unmistakable. As an adult, it has become increasingly prevalent in our world, first at the margins, then more closely, and now spoken openly with a confidence that would once have been shocking. That confidence is not accidental. It is cultivated.
Demagogues understand how this works. They rarely call for violence directly. Instead, they lower the threshold. They normalize suspicion, repeat accusations, and offer explanations for why anger is justified and blame is obvious. They speak in insinuations and slogans, and then they wait. When violence follows, they deny responsibility. They did not pull the trigger. They simply made it easier to aim.
What unsettles me most is how ordinary this has become. Antisemitism no longer appears only in history books or headline tragedies. It seeps into conversations, into social media, and into the background noise of daily life. That is how dangerous ideas survive and expand, not just by shocking us, but by wearing us down.
As I watched Nuremberg, I thought about the play I am writing, which examines art as a way to confront and resist hatred. It is not about offering easy answers or comfort. It is about bearing witness and insisting on memory, using creativity to push back against the forces that depend on forgetting and distortion.
I think about that as I text a friend half a world away to make sure he is safe. I think about it as I watch my grandchildren grow up in a world where armed guards outside synagogues are routine and Jewish fear may be dismissed as oversensitivity. I am sensitive because I have been paying attention.
That is why I was not surprised by what happened at Bondi Beach. I am angry. I am grieving. And I am writing because silence, too, has a history.
Brsvo